Thomarts Gallery

Bags of Stories

A collaborative installation by Nathi Ngulube and Nkgadi Ngulube

Presented within the curatorial framework of Ctrl + Z, Bags Of Stories is a deeply immersive collaborative installation by married artist duo Nathi and Nkgadi Ngulube, unfolding as both a social archive and an intimate meditation on partnership, memory, repair, labour, and love.

Constructed from used coffee bags infused with coffee extracts, stitched textiles, sound, live jazz, and sensory interventions, the exhibition transforms discarded materials into vessels carrying the emotional residue of human existence.

At its core, the installation reflects on the impossibility of truly “undoing” life. While the digital command Ctrl + Z promises instant reversal, lived experience remains layered with scars, tenderness, unresolved histories, and enduring emotional traces. It is within this tension between rupture and restoration that Nathi and Nkgadi situate their collaborative language—not only as artists, but as husband and wife navigating the ongoing process of building, mending, listening, and evolving together.

The coffee bag becomes the exhibition’s central metaphor. Once a carrier of commodities moving through systems of trade and consumption, it now holds the invisible weight of stories: nostalgic conversations, domestic whispers, political debates, laughter, grief, migration, longing, and spiritual echoes shared over coffee tables, bedroom privacies and kitchen spaces. Nathi transforms these weathered sacks into sculptural bodies—some swollen with emotional density, others torn, strained, emptied, or suspended like wounded skins. They resemble human vessels carrying the burden of memory.

Within these forms, the personal and collective become inseparable. Marriage itself emerges as a subtle but powerful curatorial thread throughout the exhibition. The collaborative process between Ngulube and Nkgadi mirrors the emotional architecture of a long-term union: stitching together what has been torn, carrying each other’s histories, absorbing pressure, enduring strain, and continuously repairing fragile spaces before collapse. Their dialogue through material becomes symbolic of how relationships survive through acts of care rather than perfection.

Nkgadi’s intricate tailor-made stitching and needlework introduce an extraordinary language of healing into the installation. Her interventions move beyond decoration; they become acts of emotional labour and restoration. Every thread crossing damaged hessian surfaces speaks to intimacy, endurance, domestic memory, and resilience. The stitched seams suggest wounds carefully tended over time—whether within marriages, communities, societies, or histories shaped by structural violence and displacement.

Through this collaborative union, Bags Of Stories resonates profoundly with the curatorial strands of Ctrl + Z. The work questions how social and political reparations are enacted while acknowledging that neither nations nor relationships can simply erase trauma with a single command. Instead, the installation proposes “deep repair” as a slow and human process requiring vulnerability, listening, accountability, and collective care. By reclaiming discarded coffee sacks and transforming them into sacred repositories of memory, the artists also challenge capitalist ideas of waste and value, imagining post-capitalist futures grounded in preservation, emotional connection, and ecological consciousness.

The exhibition further unfolds through live jazz performances led by Mr Trumpet and accompanying musicians, whose improvisational soundscapes move through the installation like living memory. Inspired by smoky cafés, township jazz lounges, spiritual improvisation, and ancestral gatherings, the trumpet becomes a voice of longing, reconciliation, and emotional testimony. Music drifts through the suspended coffee bags like conversations that refuse to disappear.

Nkosinathi Thomas Ngulube

Nkosinathi Thomas Ngulube (b. 1972, South Africa) is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist, curator, and founder of Thomarts Gallery based in Cape Town. His practice spans sculpture, painting, installation, public art, and socially engaged collaborative projects. Working across found materials, hessian, bronze, paper, industrial remnants, and layered surfaces, Ngulube creates emotionally charged works that investigate spirituality, labour, memory, migration, material histories, and the fragile complexities of contemporary human existence.

His practice is rooted in transforming discarded and weathered objects into spiritually resonant visual languages. Through tactile surfaces, stitched textures, coffee stains, scratchings, and layered interventions, Ngulube constructs works that function simultaneously as personal archives and collective social mirrors. His materials carry visible traces of erosion, endurance, and transformation, reflecting broader conversations around identity, displacement, sustainability, and the emotional archaeology of everyday life.

Ngulube’s immersive installations and collaborative projects merge sculpture, textile intervention, sound, and communal participation, creating environments that invite viewers into intimate reflections on humanity, resilience, and interconnectedness. Positioned between African spiritual traditions and global contemporary art discourse, his practice speaks to the tension between destruction and healing, chaos and beauty, memory and erasure.

His work has been presented through exhibitions, public art interventions, and collaborative projects across South Africa, earning recognition for its raw material language, social depth, and poetic engagement with found objects and lived experience.